Hyundai Motor and the Whitney Museum of American Art Present Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi as part of Whitney Biennial 2026
- Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi to open on the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor terrace from March 8 through August 23, 2026, the third in a series of commissions supported by Hyundai Motor Company
- Kelly Akashi to present a site-specific sculptural installation and outdoor-screen animation, exploring themes of memory and resilience
- Hyundai Motor supports the Whitney Biennial, the museum’s landmark exhibition series and the longest-running survey of American art, and the Hyundai Terrace Commission as part of its 10-year partnership with the Whitney
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Hyundai Motor Company and the Whitney Museum of American Art today announced the opening of Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, a site-specific presentation by Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi on Whitney’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery. This marks the third Hyundai Terrace Commission since the 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney was established in 2024. Part of the Whitney Biennial 2026, on view from March 8 through August 23, 2026, the commission brings together a new sculptural installation, steel relief, works on paper, and an outdoor-screen animation across the Whitney’s terrace and adjacent spaces.
Anchoring the presentation is Monument (Altadena) (2026), a chimney and walkway installation that takes shape as both reconstruction and memorial. After Akashi’s home and studio burned in the Eaton Fire in January 2025, the chimney was the only structure left standing. For the Hyundai Terrace Commission, the artist has worked with a mason to reconstruct the chimney piece by piece alongside a reconstruction of her home’s pathway, rendered in luminous cast glass brick. Installed on the terrace, the work transforms the Whitney’s outdoor gallery into a charged site of witness and a meditation on survival, rupture, and the fragile permanence of what remains.
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, 2026. Photo: Timothy Schenck.
Also on the terrace, Inheritance (Distressed) (2026) is installed on the bulkhead south of Monument (Altadena). The work draws from a personal archive, Akashi’s grandmother’s doilies, which the artist rescued from a family garage sale and later lost in the same fire. Combining images generated from pre-fire scans with weathering steel (Cor-Ten), a material historically associated with Minimalist sculpture and coded masculinity, the work brings two histories into contact: one intimate and one cultural which reflects on the struggle to know what to do with what we inherit.
Inside the museum, Imprints (2026) comprises five framed works on paper. On the terrace’s outdoor screen, Remnants (Constellations) (2026) extends the presentation into moving image, offering an animated counterpart to the exhibition’s material investigations of trace, memory, and aftermath.
Left: Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, 2026. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Right: Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2026 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 8–August 23, 2026). Photo: Steven Probert.
The act of rebuilding is not simply about material endurance; it is a deliberate labor of care, an engagement with history, and an act of reclamation. In laying each brick, my sculpture mirrors the gestures of memory itself, emphasizing that remembrance is not given, it is constructed through care and persistence. Each brick carries the record of labor and material transformation; together, they compose a new body that holds the traces of its past.
For the Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi, we were drawn to Kelly for her command of multiple mediums, and in particular for her skillful use of glass and steel. She has met the technical and conceptual demands of large-scale outdoor sculpture with aplomb, producing a monumental work that stands as a resolute testament to remembrance and the legacies that shape our collective and individual histories.
Weaving together intimate personal histories with broader collective narratives, Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi offers a moment to reflect on memory and resilience. It challenges us to consider the potential for a solidarity that transcends the individual to embrace the communal, aligning with the Hyundai Terrace Commission’s commitment to sharing transformative artistic experiences with a wider audience.
Driven by a shared commitment to presenting the most relevant art and ideas of our time, Hyundai Motor’s multiyear partnership with the Whitney includes support for both the Hyundai Terrace Commission and the Whitney Biennial, the museum’s landmark exhibition of contemporary American art, presented every two years.
Hyundai Terrace Commission is an annual, site-specific project on the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor outdoor gallery. The commission offers an expansive platform for artists to experiment at scale and to engage the museum’s terrace as an interface between art, the built environment, and the surrounding city.
This year’s Biennial, the 82nd edition of the exhibition series, offers a vivid, atmospheric survey of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives shaped by a moment of profound transition. The work on view examines varied forms of relationality, from interspecies and familial kinships to geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and the infrastructures that support and constrain contemporary life. Rather than offering a definitive answer to life today, the exhibition foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor, and unease, while proposing imaginative, unruly, and unexpected forms of coexistence.
Whitney Biennial 2026 is co-organized by Whitney Museum curators Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, with Beatriz Cifuentes, Biennial Curatorial Assistant, and Carina Martinez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow.
Accompanied images are approved only for publication in conjunction with the promotion of the Whitney Biennial 2026 and the Hyundai Terrace Commission: Kelly Akashi. Each image must not be cropped, bled off the page, colorized, solarized, overlaid with other elements (e.g., tone, text, another image, etc.), or otherwise altered, except in terms of overall size. Reproductions must include the full caption information adjacent to the image. Use of images for front covers may incur a fee and will require prior authorization from the owner and copyright holder of the work. Please contact the Whitney Press Office for such use at [email protected].
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